SANTIAGO — Chileans have learned to live with the political traumas bequeathed them by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which ended in 1990 and left about 4,000 people dead or missing. But two years ago, they were surprised to discover that he had also amassed an illicit fortune.

The source of that wealth, estimated at $28 million or more, has never been made clear. But Chilean officials say an investigation begun last year into the mysterious death of a high-ranking military officer, Colonel Gerardo Huber, is providing important clues.

Huber's death was ruled a suicide after his body was found on a riverbank early in 1992, just as he was poised to testify in a case of a covert arms deal gone bad. That multimillion-dollar transaction was handled by what current government officials suspect was a syndicate that generated wealth for Pinochet and his inner circle.

More than that, government officials say, the Huber case suggests that Pinochet and his associates were willing to use the military intelligence service not only to eliminate political threats to their power - standard practice during the dictatorship - but also to protect the fortunes they were surreptitiously accumulating.

In March, the investigating judge, Claudio Pavez Ahumada, concluded that Huber was "neutralized" as part of a plot by the Chilean military to prevent arms deals and other "irregular operations" from becoming public.

Six high-ranking retired military officers, including a former chief of the intelligence service and another general, have been arrested and charged with "illicit association" in the case.

Pavez said that his inquiry had not ended and that he aimed to discover who ordered Huber's execution and who carried it out.

He and other government officials investigating the case would not rule out that the trail could even lead to Pinochet. Withered by age and disease at 90, the discredited former dictator still casts a shadow over the life of the country, but he has escaped prosecution in the 16 years since he left the presidency.

"This was clearly a homicide," Pavez said in an interview in Santiago.

Court records, testimony and interviews with people involved in the case suggest that Pinochet's role in arms dealing was greater than he has admitted. So, too, some say, may be his knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Huber's death.

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At the moment, the Huber case is one of four judicial inquiries under way, all of which have touched on the question of illegal arms transactions and the possibility that they were one of the main sources of the former dictator's fortune.

Among the other matters being looked at, investigators said, are several that took place after Pinochet stepped down as president in 1990. These were arms sales to Ecuador in the mid-1990s, in violation of regional treaties when Ecuador was briefly at war with Peru, and the purchase of 200 Leopard tanks from the Netherlands in 1998.

After leaving the presidency, Pinochet stayed on as commander of the armed forces for eight more years.

In November, he was indicted on charges of tax evasion and fraud in connection with his overseas holdings, at least $8 million of which were placed with Riggs Bank in Washington. When one of the investigating judges questioned him in December about the arms deals and the bank account, Pinochet said he could not recall relevant details.

A July 2004 U.S. Senate report, issued after the Senate's investigation into financial irregularities at Riggs, contained copies of documents that Pinochet submitted to the bank to explain his deposits. In those records, Pinochet acknowledges receiving "commissions, fees and honorarium for work performed on special projects outside of Chile."

His lawyer, Pablo Rodríguez, said the money was from payments taken from "reserve funds" available to Pinochet as president and armed forces commander, as well as earnings from real estate ventures and donations from businessmen.

But María Inés Horvitz Lennon, a lawyer who represents the Council for the Defense of the State, the Chilean government's legal watchdog body, said that did not explain all of the fortune.

"From 1990 onward, they needed a more sophisticated scheme, because Pinochet was no longer in power, and they could not collect bribes directly," Horvitz said. "At the same time, there was Operation Silence, an ongoing operation to eliminate people who could compromise Pinochet."